gsharm

Thanks for saying this. For new, impressionable minds here who read most of the comments here and think this it's all devs - it isn't. A lot of us value Musk and incredibly awesome tech like FSD and aren't consumed by political partisanship. That tells you more about the commenter than Musk.

Some of these same commenters were trying to make you believe not long ago that FSD wasn't going to be competitive with Waymo because it dropped LIDAR. If you bring that up now they'll just change goalposts. There's no point even arguing with someone unable to approach an argument in good faith.

Growing closer to God.

That most folks in the tech community completely missed this is what makes them such easy prey to manipulative scumbags who just use them.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if it helps even 1 person out there: don't allow yourself be made a means to an end and don't make other means to ends, if possible. I acknowledge in an imperfect world it's not always possible, but we should at least: 1. be aware of it and 2. do our best to mitigate it.

In 2020 for many in media and big tech, the end was to ensure Trump wouldn't win, and even the truth itself was distorted and made a means to that end. Indefensible.

Structure your week. Set weekly goals. Set things up so that you assign weekends free to relax/do fun stuff - so they feel like actual week ends. This enables you to focus on Mon-Thurs without feeling hopeless, as your body/mind know that good time is coming later in the week. It avoids the feeling of just being aimlessly lost in time.

It's important to ensure your mind/body feel there is light at the end of the tunnel, not just at the macro but micro (days, weeks) level too.

Academia is dead.

What Austen is doing with lambdaschool.com (and similar) will be the way forward.

The decentralisation aspect is a lie, like equality under communism was a lie. See https://gauravsharma.com/2021/02/04/bitcoin-is-a-scam/

It arguably wasn't even a legitimate win, and questioning it was censored away by big tech, as well as censored during the election period (e.g. the Hunter Biden story).

This censorship was executed brazenly and openly.

See: https://www.creators.com/read/dennis-prager/01/21/the-most-i...

Many of us on the centre-right are fed up and aren't even engaging anymore. I've unfollowed all my politics feeds. The left can eat themselves for the next 4 years.

Londoner here. I think we're closer to Silicon Valley than we are to Japan. I've been working on/around my startups for almost a year now, and despite having not having anything substantial to show yet, get a lot of interest in my work, as well as being pursued all the time to go back into lucrative software contracts.

The logical conclusion of what you're suggesting is a system where only outcomes are looked at and assessed, little about the person leading up to outcome is understood, and nothing is learned, because it's somehow unacceptable to understand individual circumstances. But surely you see that it's in our own collective interests to learn why things are the way they are, instead of just indiscriminately slapping parking tickets on everything that looks bad and hoping our problems will go away?

It does cost a fortune to run. Considering every case meticulously on a case by case basis is exactly what they should be doing. That is not an idealistic expectation, it is a realistic one.

To have an effect, condemnation has to be of sufficient magnitude, such that the problem is acknowledged and recognized. It has to be necessarily grandiose in its nature. Given that you agree that the system is not fine, and can improve, where does your contention lie? How can you deny a problem from being recognized if you wish to solve it?

Any system - especially a justice system - unable to take into account peoples' circumstances is not only wasteful, but dangerous. Neutrality does not transcend doing the right thing. Justice isn't a product that is packaged and sold, it is a service, rendered on a case-by-case basis. It is done that way so that the context can be understood sufficiently well in each case. In this case it either wasn't, or they simply didn't care, or were negligent. This is wrong and it needs to be fixed.

What is your agenda? It seems as if you think the system is fine, and cannot and should not improve. Why?

What's interesting now is that Apple, BlackBerry and Microsoft now offer integrated hardware/software platforms. It's become similar to the way the console market has been between Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Makes one wonder what's going to happen with Android.

This isn't so much vendor vs vendor. It's higher than that - the war here is between integrated/closed and discrete/open systems on the client.

The virtue re:integrated/closed systems is that the companies very survival depends on these systems, so they have the best motives in providing value/service, and aren't being steered by outside influences. The virtue re:discrete/open systems is that they encourage learning and exploration, and offer transparency.

It's not so clear in which direction things will go over coming years. Both the integrated/closed (Windows, Consoles), and discrete/open (Web, Android) are models that have proven themselves to work.

Google's doing a lot of brave work pushing in the direction of discrete/open, and regardless of outcome, it's something commendable. My only worry there is regarding their hardware partnerships. The thing with the iPhone, Lumia, and BlackBerry products is they're beautifully designed, and these designs just keep getting more refined. It's like having a games console with a controller design - all users/games know it's there, and can rely on that design, even between hardware iterations whilst other elements are improved.

Microsoft did a lot of great work getting Windows to play well with not just consumers but hardware vendors too, and more or less delivered on the promise of putting a computer on every desk. Google's probable aim of putting a smartphone in person's pocket is even loftier(expense being the main hurdle for many of the world's 7-8 billion people), yet given their positioning and partnerships, they are perhaps best positioned to deliver on this promise.

So perhaps it won't play out like the console market at all.

The thing is, if smartphones get largely commoditized by Android like PCs were largely commoditized by Windows, and you can buy something perfectly decent for $300 (and you already can in something like the Nexus 4), are going to want to or need to pay more for what is perhaps only a marginally better designed product?

And of course then there's Amazon too. Interesting times ahead.

Some general observations: 1) Going Windows approximately double costs. 2) Going Reserved approximately halves costs.

Communicator

1600x900 on 14" is mediocre? Bear in mind that it's exactly the same size/weight as the 13" MacBook Air but has larger display (thanks to a narrower bezel on the sides), higher resolution, and an arguably better keyboard. Shame about the battery life, though. Also, considering they're using a carbon fibre shell, they should have been able to get the weight down to considerably less than that of the Aluminium MacBook Air. Sony got that part right with their own carbon fibre VAIO Z (lighter and with better display than either), but it has worse ergonomics than either the ThinkPad or the Air.

No product out there at the moment that gets everything right. The MacBook Air probably comes closest, although the battery life and TN+ display could both be substantially improved.

Note that the ThinkPad X220/X230 has both a better, IPS, display and can run for 12+ hours using a 9-cell battery whilst still weighing less than a 13" MacBook Pro. However, it's heavier than the newer slimmer notebooks and has lower resolution:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/record-breaker-lenovo-thinkpad-x22...

Haven't tried it yet, but it's a risky departure from the previous long-standing design (and it applies to all of their models being released this year - i.e. the previous 7-row layout is history). They seem to be taking the redesign seriously though - some more information on their blog: http://blog.lenovo.com/design/thinkpad-x1-designing-the-ulti...

My worry is that they've moved the page/up down keys quite illogically down next to the arrow keys. It just doesn't map right mentally - moving pages up/down shouldn't have to involve clicking keys either side of the arrow keys:

http://allthingsd.com/files/2012/05/Lenovo_tablet_X230t_stan...

Not too happy about the home/end keys for similar reasons.

Making the keys more ergonomic is fine but it seems there really was no incentive for them to change the layout to a 6-row one other than arbitrary stylistic reasons.

That all said, it's probably still the best notebook keyboard on the market. I have a MacBook here and feel/tactility of the keys is superior on my old 2010 ThinkPad (if only just - they're both great keyboards) - on the new models, layout issues asides, it's supposed to be even better.

ThinkPad X1 Carbon (which is their answer to the MacBook Air - similar size to the 13", but 14" with more horizontal resolution), or the 12.5" X230, which is a bit heavier, but has 60WHr+ battery options and IPS display (both missing from the MacBook Air).

I'd love to know what everyday tasks you're doing for which Chrome or the iPhone are too limiting.

It's interesting you say this. I've been experimenting with/without suits, on and off at my current place of work (an investment bank front office). What I've noticed is this:

1) If you're careful, you can get away with wearing jeans and trainers (I often wear black 501s with nike low nike cross trainers, and various casual shirts - no one really notices/cares, especially if you're in software).

2) Suits and neat shirt/trousers tend to be the "default" and perhaps signal safety/predictability more than commanding respect (which doesn't make sense since everyone wears suits around here, and everyone doesn't command everyone, so it's a shallow heuristic to use when making quick calls on people - I know some dumb people who wear suits, and smart ones who don't).

3) I've incidentally worn very casual stuff (jeans, no suit) for interviews and then actually worn suit/tie/etc on the job later, i.e. more out of curiosity/wanting to, than obedience. I do think in some ways they can be nicer to wear. If you go more into studying design concepts, you start seeing some good elements in play within the standard template of what constitutes a suit (shirt, blazer, tie, boots, cufflinks, etc). Is there a better alternative? Not sure - I loved Steve Job's outfit too, though.

Imagine the Barrack Obama whitehouse photo with him in a hoodie. It wouldn't be unthinkable for him to do this, but I'm not sure it would communicate the right message to the general public (again, perhaps it's about projecting the idea of safety, stability, predictability, etc). In that sense, suits are a good communication facilitator.

A lot of jackasses wear suits, sure, but a lot of jackasses use iPhones, for example too. It doesn't mean they're a bad thing. The bigger problem perhaps with wearing a suit is that there are so many people wearing them now, many of them doing it because other people do it, rather than because they have some pure conviction to do so, that it has become a "red ocean" strategy, which naturally goes against the flow of innovation.

This. I wish Steve Jobs was still around, but just as much, I'm glad Jeff Bezos is still around.

Mark has gathered a lot of great people, and they're focused. I wouldn't underestimate them.

How does killing people equate to the military force effectively doing its job?

I remember where in one of Vonnegut's books, he describes life not as some fixed end-result in time to be celebrated or mourned, but a process, something you could visualize as a roughly drawn line taking all sorts of directions through time, alongside other lines, often interacting with some of them, creating effects, and finally terminating.

I suppose, in some sense, it's not far off from our idea of a process running on a computer, often interacting with other processes, launching other processes, eventually terminating.

Taking that further, one way to look at this is that life is really a process, running on our software (genetic code), which we have some control over (somehow). We literally are code that writes code, albeit very slowly, over generations. And perhaps that what we really want is to able to look back at what we've etched into this big computer's (i.e. the world's shared) memory and be proud of it.

Smart move by Facebook. If Google had bought Instagram instead and integrated with G+, things would have gotten interesting. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a bidding war that pushed the price this high. Reminds me of the recent Firefox deal.

"After all, it is no longer the purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose of machines to execute our programs."

- Edsger Dijkstra

By extension, I think it's more important for us to think about our programs than the operating systems they run on.

What are your thoughts on C#?

I'd argue their hardware is still better designed than that of most Android vendors, especially for text input speed and accuracy. Where RIM went wrong was underestimating the importance of software and the surrounding ecosystem. Their App store was dreadful.

Incidentally, this is perhaps where Nokia did the smart thing by recognising similar weaknesses in their software strategy, and teamed up with Microsoft.

Imagine a world where RIM had licensed Android 2 years ago as their primary OS for all current BlackBerries. They would probably be the world's number one phone vendor right now.

Reminds me of a line from one of my favourite authors:

"Maturity...is knowing what your limitations are".

This reminds me of Paul Graham's recent list:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3686840

Except there is no mention of cancer. Is a solution really so much out of reach?

I feel like there's an identity issue here to blame, something along the lines of "we're programmers, we're not about making medical breakthroughs".

Yet I can't shake off the notion that everything, absolutely everything, is interlinked, and we're in a better position, perhaps the only position, to understand and exploit this concept fully, in order to solve such problems.

Yes, but profitable businesses aren't necessarily big successes.

Big successes and sustainable businesses aren't necessarily the same thing. This is an important distinction because a sustainable business is a viable option for many, and "big success" isn't. And the biggest ones are going to leapfrog such schemes anyway. It's like American Idol for programmers. What you're doing is interesting, but it's questionable whether it's promoting the right values.